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B.C. households spend the most on online shopping, dropping $3,369 a year, new database finds

The average Canadian household spends $2,748 on online shopping per year.Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Jake Edmiston

Published: November 26, 2018 - 10:16 AM

Households in British Columbia spend more online annually than households in any other province, according to new research on the e-commerce habits of Canadians.

The data — released to the Financial Post by Environics Analytics and J.C. Williams Group ahead of Cyber Monday — tracks the billions Canadians have been spending online in 2018 and predicts online grocery shopping will soon begin to challenge the sales supremacy of the apparel industry.

The ClickSpend database found British Columbia households each spend $3,369 online per year — more than $600 above the national average of $2,748. Alberta is in second, with households spending roughly $3,000 annually, followed closely by Ontario.

Quebec households spent the least online, at $2,336, though the ClickSpend report found Quebeckers are well ahead of the rest of Canada when it comes to ordering groceries and alcohol. Nearly six per cent of groceries in Quebec are bought online — 20 per cent above the average in Canada, the report said. It’s one of the distinct differences between provinces, cities and even neighbourhoods highlighted in the report.

The ClickSpend data comes from a semi-annual survey involving three rounds of questions with 2,500 nationally representative respondents in Canada. It focuses on 14 spending categories — from jewelry to garden supplies — that make up $343 billion in household expenditures this year, excluding services (from a total of $1.15 trillion in annual household expenditures). An estimated $41 billion of those $343 billion in purchases, or 11.9 per cent, will happen online, the report says. Clothing is the current sales powerhouse in Canadian e-commerce, with $7.8 billion in 2018 online sales, followed by food and grocery, with health and beauty close behind.

“Health and beauty products are another area that could see increased competition from online retailers,” the ClickSpend 2018 report reads, adding that while Canadians are certainly comfortable ordering beauty products online — projected to spend almost $6 billion — the online spend share “is only 13 per cent” of purchases made in the category.

“Grocery will be the category to watch,” the report said, adding that its $6.4 billion in online sales represent only five per cent of the total grocery spend. “The category could easily eclipse clothing if Canadian households respond to the increased offerings of online groceries.”

The ClickSpend report also tracks online shopping behaviour by demographic, splitting the Canadian population into 68 “lifestyle types.” Consider the Urban Digerati segment: “Characterized by younger households with upper-middle incomes,” they tend to order furniture, health and beauty products, toys and games online at a higher rate than average. In fact, the eight lifestyle types in the report that tend to live in urban areas “stand out as heavy online shoppers.” But certain suburban segments can spend just as much.

The “Trucks and Trades” type, for instance — upper-middle class suburban families in cities like Red Deer, Regina and St. John’s — spends as much as the Urban Digerati, but their purchases are vastly different — with auto parts and sporting goods among their most frequent purchases, the report said.